Who’s with us? Who says “period” after a completed sentence or “question mark” after a question when sharing voice to text?
According to our teens and tweens, we are so “old” when we add grammar to our text messages.
Is it a matter of being old…or a matter of wanting to be grammatically correct, taking ourselves back to Sr. Anthony Leo’s 8th grade English classes?
Because we’re in our early 40s and still pretty youthful, we’re going to say….grammatically correct!!
Today is National Grammar Day, and the motto of the day is “It’s not only a date, it’s an imperative: March forth on March 4th to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!”
In that case, we wanted to share some of our favorite (and pretty easy) tools and tips about grammar.
Tips and Tricks:
- Read well-crafted books and listen to awesome speakers. Indulging in well-respected, credible news sources and nonfiction offers excellent examples of good grammar.
- Learn from your mistakes. If the red squiggly line continues to pop up on your screen, take note and try to remember how it was corrected last time.
- Always use the Grammar check tool on any system you are occupying — that includes Word and Pages documents, emails, event text messages at times. You just have to be careful with the good ol’ Auto-Correct function. Sometimes that can get carried away!
- Review English Grammar 101 as a refresher. Scroll across for quick help for all types of grammar. Stuck on parts of speech, sentence structure, punctuation, or troublesome words? The site offers an engaging and easy-to-follow exercise.
- Use a style manual. There are several available online and good ol’ hard copies! The guide we use for our content writing is The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook. It’s the most used, and our favorite “Grammar Girl” uses it too!
- Follow Grammar Girl’s social platforms, visit her site, read her blogs, and listen to her podcasts. Mignon Fogarty is awesome!
- Visit Grammarly! It helps you find and correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation typos quickly and conveniently. Grammarly’s free and premium offerings are your pocket editors, ready with helpful tips and suggestions whenever and wherever you write.
- Take a few LinkedIn Learning classes. The teachers are great and courses are quick yet informative. You may even land some type of certificate!
- Continue to add all the .!?” .!?” .!?” .!?” .!?”s you want to your texts, emails, social posts, proposals, and reports. Maybe the kiddos will catch on!
Happy day to all the established writers and to those who may not have found that hidden talent yet. Take it one word, sentence, and paragraph at a time.